Comments on: Good to the bone; adducing honesty via imaginghttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/07/good-to-the-bone-adducing-honesty-via-imaging/
Wed, 04 Dec 2013 06:45:00 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.1By: Caledonianhttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/07/good-to-the-bone-adducing-honesty-via-imaging/#comment-16814
Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:12:37 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/07/14/good-to-the-bone-adducing-honesty-via-imaging/#comment-16814The next step would be to locate people who seem to have no discomfort with telling gross lies, and determining whether they are distinguishable from people who have no problem with truth-telling.
If we can detect a struggle between competing desires (to lie and to tell the truth) but not determine whether honesty or dishonesty rules when there is no struggle, this technique has some fundamental limitations.
]]>By: Ed Yonghttp://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/07/good-to-the-bone-adducing-honesty-via-imaging/#comment-16813
Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:38:44 +0000http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/07/14/good-to-the-bone-adducing-honesty-via-imaging/#comment-16813So, I thought it was a fascinating study. It’s interesting that the paper mentions lie detection only in one paragraph towards the end of the discussion. It’s almost throw-away, and it focuses mainly on limitations. The full bit:

Although our present focus is on the cognitive neuroscience of honesty and dishonesty, our findings and methods may be of interest to researchers studying brain-based lie detection (14), in part because the present study is arguably the first to establish a correlation between patterns of neural activity and real lying. However, the present experiment has several notable limitations that deserve attention. First, the model we have developed has not been tested on an independent sample, and therefore its probative value remains unknown. Second, our task design does not allow us to identify individual lies. Third, our findings highlight the challenge in distinguishing lying from related cognitive processes such as deciding whether to lie. Finally, it is not known whether our task is an ecologically valid model for real-world lying. For example, the neural signature of real prepared lies (28) may look different from the patterns observed in association with lying here. Bearing these limitations in mind, our findings may suggest new avenues for research on brainbased lie detection. For example, our findings suggest that interrogations aimed at eliciting indecision about whether to lie, rather than lies per se, may be more effective, provided that the goal is to assess the trustworthiness of the subject rather than the veracity of specific statements.